I remember the last recession in the early nineties; it kicked in shortly after I started Nova Connection. Just like this one, it followed a period of excess. It was not a pleasant time and the instinct was to batten down the hatches to weather it out.
Inevitably, cost cutting was rife and the usual targets went under the knife, with marketing and training almost invariably on the list. But the difficulty with this type of surgery is differentiating fat from muscle.
Here are some reasons why customer surveys are muscle and not fat. They enable you to:
- find out if your customers are likely to defect
- discover what you need to do to retain existing customers – after all it’s 4-6 times more expensive to win new customers than retain existing ones
- learn more about your competitors’ offerings and what they are up to
- uncover opportunities for winning a greater share of business from existing customers
- identify requirements for new products or services
It’s not an exhaustive list of reasons for doing a customer survey, but it doesn’t contain much fat.
Perhaps it’s time for some fresh thinking on marketing expenditure. As Albert Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem using the same thinking that created it.
Mike West
www.novaconnection.com